Really need to schedule downtime to facilitate a drive firmware upgrade to KD0A.

PS6510ES were not available at our time of purchase.

(6+1 6+1)(6+1 6+1)(6+1 6+1)(3+1) + 2hot spare
Total Usable Spaces: 39 Disk

Re: ESXv5.x offers many benefits over 4.1. Performance, greater storage integration just to name a few.

Re: RAIDsets. Seveal EQL models use multiple RAIDsets that are joined together to create a single storage instance.

I’ve also seen it somewhere just last week, so for a 45 + 3 hot spares Disks of PS6510E in RAID50, it’s actually broken into 3 RAID50, that’s 14 disks + 1 hot spares each, so 15 disks x 3 + 3 hot spares = 48 disks. (I suspect I may be wrong with the numbers, so it’s something like this)

As Equallogic RAID is not a simple RAID5/RAID50/RAID6, that’s why it explained you can have 3 disk failure at the same time without having the volume down I think.

Finally, I wonder why didn’t you purchase the PS6510ES feature with SSD caching? It would be much helpful with the extreme fast SSD disks inside.

We’ve had a single disk fail late last week – bad sectors apparently – one of the two hot-spares kick in as expected.
RAID reconstruction was successfully completed in ~14hrs – still not bad for a 46 disk array.

I believe our previous 4 hour rebuild was more likely just an integrity check (bringing 2 good [mistakenly marked as bad] disks back into the array).

Can anyone clarify the internal RAID setup underlying a RAID50 EQL array. In the process of getting back online in a degraded state during our original 3 disk failure, I remember seeing references to 3 separate RAID50 LUNs + a smaller RAID5 LUN – I didn’t quite know what to make of it, or how to translate that into our 46disk RAID50 array (+2hotspares).

I totally agree the US support guys are much more expertise to the EQL product. They are professional and very confident on the subject matter.

just to clarify,
Dell AU Pro/Ent Support wanted to reset and totally rebuild the array, at which point we stalled, and escalated the issue to US Pro/Ent Support [== EQL techies] (that know what they are doing).

However your post about drive firmware availability highlights my constant bug bear with Dell support – not all support groups are on the same page [info repeatedly doesn't filter through to all relevant support groups] and inexperienced techies are assigned to do major upgrades they have little experience with – we just went thru a EQL SAN firmware upgrade process not less than 2 weeks ago, and not without issues I might add. When asked, no drive firmware upgrades were needed apparently.

But our ST31000524NS drives are covered by the link you’ve supplied.

We had our whole VM infrastructure backed up and shutdown for that firmware upgrade [switches, MEM on the servers, SANs - the whole box and dice] (and that was the time to be doing hard drive f/w upgrades). grrr…..

12/12/2012 Firmware Release Announcement – Hard Disk Drive Firmware KD0A

In November, Dell announced the release of Hard Disk Drive Firmware KD0A for selected 7200RPM based 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB drives shipped on the PS4000E, PS6000E, PS6010E, PS6500E and the PS6510E arrays. This Drive Firmware removes a false failure condition that caused drives to fail at an accelerated rate.

Note that Dell has made improvements in drive error handling routines of EqualLogic array firmware over the course of the last few years and has worked closely with drive manufacturers to improve error handling routines of the hard drives.

If you are using arrays with these drives, Dell strongly recommends that you update the drive firmware. You can confirm if you are using these drives by reading the instructions in release notes.

Btw, RAID6 is the latest recommendation from Equallogic for large disks, somehow they just get rid of RAID5 or RAID50.

Finally, I am really surprised US EQL team can bring back the data after your local Dell ProSupport wiped out everything, how is this possible?

Nevertheless, US EQL support has much more in depth experience then the local support team, I always ask them to help me via WebEx, it has always been a pleasant experience.

Unimpressed with Dell AU Pro/Ent Support – they didnt know enough about the product and basically wrote off all data on the disks and were ready to do a factory reset / total RAID50 array rebuild.

However, actual EQL Support in the US managed to reconstruct the array back into a usable but degraded state, and then recover to a normal fully functional operating state – only one disk was actually bad (and needed replacement).

Anyways, my point related to this thread is that the 48disk RAID50 rebuild/reconstruction/integrity-check was all good within about 4 hours. I’ve seen Perc4 ctrlr 5 disk array rebuilds take 12 hours, so that was very impressive.